“The Mountaintop” at City Theatre

The setting of Katori Hall’s play The Mountaintop (currently running at City Theatre) reveals nearly everything we need to know about what is at stake in the action: “Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968” – the evening before Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on the balcony outside that very room. It is a dark and stormy night; and the cliché of that opening seems a deliberate one, an early indication of the play’s interest in taking its audience on a journey from stereotype and “what we (think we) know” to the unexpected surprises that are revealed when clichés, stereotypes, and everything we (think we) know is subjected to closer inspection.